Column: From the Brink of Sanity

Benjamin Secher on Adam Masbach's Go the F--- to Sleep.

By Benjamin Secher

6:05PM BST 12 Jul 2011

If the act of reading a bedtime story to a toddler can feel like a weary form of prayer – a softly spoken invocation to Hypnos – then Go the F--- to Sleep (Canongate, £9.99) by Adam Mansbach, an American author and young father, is a gleeful howl of blasphemy.

Fourteen simple verses addressed to a pint-size insomniac and illustrated with cute pictures of wide-eyed children and slumbering animals, the book appears to belong to a soporific tradition that stretches back from The Gruffalo to Goodnight Moon – until you read it.

“The cubs and the lions are snoring/ Wrapped in a big snugly heap,” begins a typical verse. “How come you can do all this other great s---/ But you can’t lie the f--- down and sleep?”

No more a tale to be read to a child than Marcel Duchamp’s urinal is a pot to pee in, the book would be easy to dismiss as the unhinged raging of a sleep-starved mind had it not become, for a brief moment, one of the bestselling books in the Western world.

As the father of a two-and-a-half-year-old son and six-month-old daughter, I am all too familiar with the exquisite agonies of bedtime. Having spent countless hours perched on a small, frog-shaped chair beside my wakeful son’s cot, one soothing hand stretched awkwardly through the bars, I have to admit Mansbach’s sentiment strikes a chord.

Books tackling the issue of getting a child to sleep are nothing new: usually called things such as The Baby Whisperer, they tend to suggest that the parent is doing something wrong.

Mansbach’s book is different. The bracing language may be earning it headlines, but its true appeal – and, I suspect, the reason it has caught on with the toddler-terrorised masses – lies in its unapologetic acknowledgement that early parenthood is a struggle, a state defined as often by frustration as delight. For the exhausted parent, nudged to the brink of sanity by lack of sleep, GTFTS is more than a reason to snigger – it’s a gesture of compassion.